I miss Backbone too. You could just step through the code in the debugger and it was so compact.

With React you can’t really do that. It’s always following an error message saying: “look near this component” which is often deep in the hierarchy of some third party package’s component hierarchy that is transpiled into a single line with no source maps.

I think there is a huge benefit in making things easy to step-through in a debugger when something goes wrong.